Saturday, February 8, 2014

When she was Bebop “Bobbie” Carroll

By Chet Williamson

In
his monumental memoir, Notes from a
Battered Grand: Fifty Years of Music, from Honky-tonk to High
Society, Worcester-born author Don
Asher dedicates all of chapter one to his first encounter with the
legendary local pianist, Jaki Byard. In chapter two he turns his
attention to yet another great home-grown talent, Barbara Carroll.

Here’s
his riff: “My days at Martha Cantor’s North Main Street studio
were numbered. I didn’t tell her I was simultaneously studying
elsewhere. But she had detected something coarse and alien
infiltrating the texture of my playing, and she was puzzled. ‘Your
legato lines are losing definition and clarity, Donald, and I can’t
seem to put my finger on the difficulty.’

“Concurrently
Barbara Carroll (nee Coppersmith) was getting herself seduced, drawn
down the same sordid, enchanting alleys. She had made her pilgrimage
to Dominic’s Café, which was becoming a Mecca for southern New
England piano players. (Hearing Jackie [sic, Jaki Byard] in that
environment was like encountering Horowitz on a drink-stained spinet
in a back-road motel cocktail lounge.)

Jaki Byard

“I
would see her near the front of the line at the Plymouth Theater on
Sunday afternoons and in the tiny cubicles at Carl Seder’s Music
Mart listening to King Cole and Teddy Wilson records, head bent, eyes
closed. Then suddenly she had deserted Martha Cantor and was playing
three and four nights a week in the eastside Worcester dives and
turnpike roadhouses strung halfway to Boston like dingy boxcars on a
coal-littered siding.

“Within
a few weeks I followed suit, divulging to Martha the
Dominic’s-Byard-Saxtrum connection. She was devastated. Two of her
prize pupils jumping ship in the space of a month to vanish, perhaps
forever, beneath the waves of vulgarity. She phoned my mother to
express her dismay, sorrow, and sympathy, and my distraught tearful
mom all but said Kaddish over my watery grave.”

Carroll
was born in Worcester. The date was January 25, 1925. These days she
lives in Manhattan where she has resided since leaving New England
more than 50 years ago.

Carroll
grew up at 41 June Street where she began playing the piano at age
five. She is the youngest of three daughters. Her parents were David
and Lilian (Levine) Coppersmith. By the way, a cousin is bassist Mike
Palter, who is one half of the duo with his wife pianist/singer Lynn
Jackson.

“My
two older sisters had been given piano lessons and violin lessons and
all kinds of music lessons. Nothing happened,” Carroll recalls.
They were not interested and they didn’t practice. So, my parents
were rather unhappy, disenchanted with the whole idea of music
lessons.

Young Barbara Coppersmith at the piano

“I
came along and I really wanted to play, but at that time things were
tough, money was tight and I was really discouraged to take lessons.
I persisted. I really showed them that I was serious. So, they
started getting me piano lessons. I was about eight years old when I
began studying classical piano.”

As
Asher mentioned, Carroll studied with Martha Cantor, who was long
considered to be the foremost classical piano teacher of the area. She
was the sister of theatrical impresario, Arthur Cantor. “Yes,
Martha Cantor was one of my teachers,” Carroll says. “I think I
went to her home. I studied with her for a while. Then I studied in
Boston with private teachers. Then I went to the New England
Conservatory of Music.”

In
a radio interview with Terri Gross on “Fresh Air,” heard on NPR,
Carroll talked about technique. “As far as formal training in
playing the piano,” she said, “I certainly think it is helpful in
giving you the technical ability to play the piano and play whatever
you want. If you have the technique you can go ahead and play
whatever comes to mind.”

Commerce High School

Carroll
also told Gross that she used to play things that she heard on the
radio and “try to compose little things. I was very interested in
playing.” Of
those she heard on the radio, Carroll singles out Art Tatum, Teddy
Wilson and Nat Cole -- “all the people who became my idols. That’s
when I became very interested in jazz. I don’t recall seeing any of
them in Worcester at the time. I was very young. I was mostly
listening to the records. That’s all it was, except classical
music, which is what I was studying. I didn’t study jazz. Jaki
Byard was around and wonderful.”

While
still a teenager Carroll began working around town. “We had a
little group in high school,” she says. “We used to play Bar
Mitzvahs, weddings and things like that. It was usually three or four
pieces... clarinet, drums – not the greatest instrumental
assortment, but we worked with what we had. We played some jazz. It
was all head arrangements. You couldn't classify it as arrangements.
It was just getting together and playing tunes.”

In
an interview with Marian McPartland during her spotlight on “Piano
Jazz,” Carroll talked about her transformation from classical to
jazz, saying, “It
wasn’t anything that I sat down and formulated and analyzed. It was
something that I innately knew I wanted to do. There was never any
question in my mind. Because I was young and innocent, I suppose, and
very naive, it never occurred to me that it might be very difficult
for me to do these things. Number one, because it was difficult to
play jazz anyway. It wasn’t a stable kind of living. Secondly,
because I was a female. That was relatively unheard of in those
days.”

After
graduating from high school Carroll moved to Boston to attend the New
England Conservatory of Music, earning tuition money gigging around
town. “There was a man named Sam Sax who was giving a course in
jazz,” she says. “I took that for a little while.

My stay at the
conservatory was rather brief because I wanted to go to New York. I
went to school for awhile and began playing in various clubs around
Boston, at the Mayfair and the Latin Quarter. In those days they had
a house band and what they called a relief band, which was a rumba
band. And lucky me,” she says sarcastically. “I played with the
rumba band. I learned a lot of rumbas that way.”

Carroll
says she worked with band-leader Ruby Newman, who was instrumental in
her making connections in Boston. “He was a society band leader,
who got me my union card, which was very nice. It allowed me to
work.”

In
a great piece by Sue Terry in the New York's musicians local 802
newsletter, Terry
notes that Carroll eventually left school to pursue music full time.
"In those days you worked real late, 'til 2 or 3 in the
morning,” the pianist said. “It was hard to get up and go to
school every day.”

Terry
reports: “She was accepted into the Boston AFM chapter in 1944, a
necessity in order to work in area clubs.
Her talents as a pianist on the Boston scene, which also included a
stint with a four-piece rumba band brought her to the attention of
United States military personnel. They enlisted her to do a USO tour
with an all-woman trio, Elinor Sherry and the Swinghearts.”

Carroll
recalls, "The guitarist was a wonderful musician named Marion
Gange, who had been with the Ina Ray Hutton band. So we had this
little trio and we went to play the hospitals, playing for the boys
who had been injured, who were blind, or amputees. There was a whole
troupe - a juggler, musicians, singers, about 15 people - who would
go right into the hospital wards and play. We would start in New York
and go all the way down south and out west to the coast of California
and back. We played Army, Navy and Marine bases."

After
the war, Carroll found herself in Philadelphia. In 1946, she spent a
year and a half playing solo piano in a cocktail lounge. In 1947,
Carroll finally worked up the courage to move to New York. “The big
city beckoned me,” she told NPR’s Terri Gross. “I got to New
York City as quickly as I could.”

In
an interview with Downbeat, Carroll talks about those early
days of freelancing in New York and dealing with sexism. In his book,
A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Wil Friedwald
quoted Carroll: “When I first came to New York, I couldn’t get
any work using my real name, so I had friends who would send me to
jobs. But they would tell the contractor to look for a ‘Bobby’
Carroll. By the time they realized that ‘Bobby’ was ‘Bobbie,”
who was actually Barbara, it was too late.”

Carroll
told Downbeat that she would “arrive at the location, go up
to the bandstand, the leader would look at me, say, ‘Who are you?’
and I’d say, ‘I’m the pianist for the evening.’ Everybody
thought if you were a girl, you couldn’t play, you know.”

But,
as Friedwald pointed out, “After they heard her play, Carroll was
never fired, and eventually, acquired a reputation under her real
name and gender identity.”

Forming
her first trio, Carroll made her debut at the Club Downbeat at
66 West 52nd Street – then known as “Swing Street.” “I was
lucky,” she said. “I played opposite Dizzy Gillespie’s big
band. I had a marvelous trio, Chuck Wayne playing the guitar and
Clyde Lombardi on bass. At that time, Dizzy had John Lewis playing
piano, Ray Brown playing bass and James Moody on saxophone. There
were two acts, Dizzy and then my trio. We were there for four weeks
and it was heaven.”

Carroll, Lombardi, and Wayne

The Trio going over the music

In
his book New York Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in
Gotham, author Nick Catalano quotes Carroll’s take on the city
in the late 1940s. “During this exact time period, the glory days
of Fifty Second Street were in full swing with bebop sweeping the
street like a tornado. At The Onyx, The Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s,
and other clubs, the bandstands were alive with the black beboppers
who had invented the music up in Harlem and were now performing it
for packed houses of whites who could not get enough of it. Charlie
Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Oscar Pettiford,
Max Roach and other black boppers ruled supreme on Swing Street, and
white players of repute were fighting to access the new music and jam
along.”

Carroll and Dizzy Gillespie

The
energy and excitement was explosive. For Carroll, it was, “really
something for a little girl from Worcester, Massachusetts.”
According to Pizzi, in 1948, Carroll was Benny Goodman’s next
choice (following his fall out with Mary Lou Williams) to record with
his short-lived bebop combo, which featured Wardell Gray on tenor
saxophone.

Through
Goodman, Carroll made her earliest documented recording as part of a
studio band led by Ake “Stan” Hasselgard. According to Friedwald,
the Swedish clarinetist was both “Benny Goodman’s only protégé
on his own instrument and probably the first person to play bebop on
that instrument.”

Friedwald
also reported that over the next few years, before her self-imposed
retirement, Carroll recorded on “many classic early modern jazz
sessions, including a live recording at the Royal Roost (with J.J.
Johnson, Lee Konitz, Cecil Payne, Buddy DeFranco and Max Roach) in
which she spells Bud Powell himself for one number and a fabulous
studio date (with Red Rodney, Serge Chaloff, Al Cohn, and Oscar
Pettiford) that’s been issued under both Chaloff and Pettiford’s
names at different times.”

After
the Club Downbeat, Carroll’s next steady gig in New York was at
Georgie Auld’s Tin Pan Alley in the Hotel Markwell, at 49th
and Broadway, where she worked as a single. According to Friedwald,
Carroll’s first date as a leader happened in 1950, a date that
included two originals, “Barbara’s Carol,” and “The Puppet
Who Danced Bop.”

In
1951, when bassist Clyde Lombardi left to join the Woody Herman band,
Carroll not only hired a replacement, she would meet her future
husband, Joe Shulman, a known player around New York having
participated in the Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool sessions.

Claude Thornhill Orchestra, featuring bassist Joe Shulman

Carroll
recalls their meeting. “My bass player was leaving so Herb
Wasserman, the drummer, suggested I call Joe, who was a friend of
his. Well, at the time he was playing with Peggy Lee and name bands
like Claude Thornhill. So I said, ‘Oh, he wouldn’t want to work
with me. But Herb told me to call him anyway. It turned out he was at
liberty and so he came down and rehearsed with us. He found he liked
the musical freedom of a small group, so he stayed on.”

The
new trio’s first gig was at The Embers, 161 East 54th between
Lexington and Third Streets. “They always had two attractions at
once,” Carroll told writer Sanford Josephson. “Lo and behold,
when we got there for rehearsal, I was told that the other act was
Art Tatum. I restrained myself from running out on 54th Street into
the traffic. Anyway, it was such an experience because we would play
and then he would go on. He was so wonderful to me, so encouraging.
And having the opportunity to listen to him every night was
stunning.”

Art Tatum

Carroll
told Downbeat magazine that the pianist, although
intimidating, was very supportive. “The first time we were there,”
she recalled, “He was very sweet and very helpful to me. He didn’t
give me technical advice, but he realized it was a trauma playing
opposite him, and he was very encouraging.”

These
were heady times for Carroll and company. As Friedwald wrote: “Her
trios and quartets provide accompaniment for such colossi as Paul
Desmond, Stan Getz, and even Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday.”

Often
hailed as the first feminine disciple of Bud Powell bop piano school,
Carroll also began to acquire society following, playing many of the
finest supper clubs in New York. She performed on stage as a jazz
pianist in the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, Me and Juliet.
And, through her work in theater, began to accompany cabaret singers.

In
1957, tragedy hit. Her husband of three years, Schulman, died of a
heart attack while the couple vacationed on Fire Island, NY. He was
33 – Sept. 12, 1923-Aug. 2, 1957.Shulman
was one of the more in-demand bassists of his generation and his
talents were diverse and all encompassing. He worked and recorded
with everyone from Les Brown to Django Reinhardt, from Peggy Lee to
Duke Ellington.

In
her grief, Carroll continued working for as long as she could. “After
he died it was very difficult,” she said, “because I wanted to
work, but you see I was working with a trio and I needed a bass
player and so I had to audition bass players. And, it was extremely
difficult. Nobody played as well as he and, of course, nobody could
fill his shoes …. It took a long time to get over that.”

Bebop
Bobbie Carroll took time off from music in the 1960s. She returned to the music scene in 1972 and continues today. Her
diverse musical career has encompassed appearing on Broadway with her
trio in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Me and Juliet. Her extensive resume
ranges from appearances in concert halls, jazz clubs, to major TV
shows and festival stages throughout the world. She has also
performed for President and Ms. Clinton at the White House.

In
her illustrious career Carroll has recorded more than 30 albums. In
her interview on “Fresh Air,” Gross asked Carroll how it felt to
always be referred to as the 'lady pianist?' Asking, “I imagine you
were thought of as almost like a novelty act, because you were a
woman?”

Carroll
answered by saying, “You put it very nicely. You are saying, 'lady'
pianist. Actually what people would say when they were giving you the
ultimate compliment was: 'Gee, you play good for a girl. Or, worst
still, you play just like a man.'”

Note:
This is a work in progress. Comments, corrections, and suggestions
are always welcome at: walnutharmonicas@gmail.com. Also see:
www.worcestersongs.blogspot.com

3 comments:

Great job as always, Chet, and good to see Carroll-the-jazz-player getting her due. Mostly we hear about Carroll-the-cabaret-star. Anybody who likes piano jazz should hear Have You Met Miss Carroll?, recorded for RCA in 1955 with Shulman and Ralph Pollack. She swings like mad. Thanks for the post-- Dick Vacca